Houkulele: Houston's Ukulele Club

Houkulele is Houston’s ukulele club, a vibrant community of players of all ages and skill levels. We represent the culturally diverse Greater Houston Area and have fun encouraging each other to grow musically while connecting with the public through our shared love of the ukulele.

Want to contact us? Join our Facebook group!

Friday, October 4, 2013

Carry your music on your iPad!

Interested in carrying around your ukulele music on an iPad? Here are some basic steps that should help you do just that...

A lot of ukulele music is available in PDF format (for example, the songbooks we link to on this site). Even if you can't find a PDF version of a song you like, there are ways to print the music to PDF yourself. For the purposes of this post we'll stick with grabbing existing PDFs off websites, but once you get this working, there's even more music out there you can take with you.

Once you've tracked down a PDF or three that you'd like to carry around with you, you need something on the iPad to open the file. I'd suggest getting iBooks from the App Store as a good starting point:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibooks/id364709193?mt=8

It's made by Apple, it's free, and it does a decent job of managing PDF files on the iPad.

Once you have iBooks installed, launch the Safari web browser on the iPad and go to where the PDF can be downloaded. For example, you could go to our Songbooks page:
http://www.houkulele.com/p/songbooks.html

Click on the link for a songbook, and it'll open the PDF for you in Safari. Tap the middle of the PDF and you should see a black menu-type bar show up towards the top with an 'Open in "iBooks"' button on it:
Click the 'Open in "iBooks"' button.

Once it copies the PDF to iBooks, go back to Safari, hit the back button and download the next PDF, and so on.

From that point on, when you open iBooks, you'll have a section called PDFs that has the songbooks you've downloaded. Enjoy!

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